Sport: Backgammon

The Emperor Claudius wrote a book on the Roman form of the game. Domitian was an adept and Caligula a cheat. Its English name comes from the Saxon baec (back) and gamen (game)—a game in which the draughtsmen are liable to be sent back. For a long time it has been played on sidewalk tables in European restaurants, on steamers, in school common rooms, and in nurseries. In the U. S. it has gained new favor in the last year. Its vogue came mysteriously, quickly: boards, once relatively easy to get, came to be in such demand that toy and sporting goods stores could hardly supply them fast enough. Because interruptions do not spoil it and because of its speculative possibilities, club-car members took it up; fellow-members mocked at first, then also learned. Now, as club-cars rattle home in the ‘fagend of early summer afternoons, the dice click on the board with the raised sides, the draughtsmen move from point to point, doubles are exchanged, and money.*

An authority on backgammon is Grosvenor Nicholas, Manhattan clubman, retired wine importer. Last week his book, issued in 1928 when nobody cared, enjoyed high sales. Backgammoner Nicholas himself, urbane, quiet-spoken, contradicted his own contention that there is no skill in the game by winning, in one afternoon, 35 games of backgammon in a club (New York Racquet & Tennis) where sometimes 1,000 games are played a day. Writes he: “It is unnecessary to preserve silence, always so depressing. The disturbing presence of the fair sex . . . is never unwelcome. Where there is no concentration, there can be no distraction.”

After discussing the derivation of the game, telling how to play it, codifying its rules, Backgammoner Nicholas accounts for the present vogue. Backgammon has become popular, will become more so, he insists, because to the old deliberate dicing game of Egyptian kings and Roman politicians contemporary rules have added a new convention—doubling. After a game has started, any player may, at any time before he throws his dice, double the stake for which the game is being played. The opponent can either accept the double and go on with the game or refuse it, sacrifice his stake, start a new game. When he has accepted the double, he has the whole right to double a second time. He can make this second double before any of his throws. The right of making the third double goes back to the first doubler. There is no limit to the number of doubles that can be made, but the greatest number ever recorded in a game starting at $1 stake is twelve ($4,096). If two excited brokers on a club-car should make 20 doubles in a $1 game, they would be playing for $1,048,576.

“For some unaccountable reason,” writes Backgammoner Nicholas, “opponents at backgammon indulge themselves in mental and emotional activities to an extraordinary degree and far beyond anything that the play of this simple game seems to require. . . . The extent of these manifestations seems to be peculiar to backgammon. . . .”

* Backgammon is played upon a board of checkerboard size, with 15 draughtsmen for each of the two players, and a pair of dice. The board is divided into four “tables,” each being marked with six long triangular “points” colored alternately in two colors. The object: to move your draughtsmen in accordance with the dice throws from your opponent’s inner table to your own, and off, before he does.